For today, I did a technique I never tried before - water spotting.
This probably would never happen if What's Up Nails did not put it as a one of the prompts for their challenge.
This technique was all the rage couple of years ago, but I never tried it myself. In that period, I tried plenty of tutorials on this technique.
Idea is that you place drop of the polish on the water (in the cup) and then spray it with something with high alcohol content. I seen this done with alcohol, hair spray, cologne - all with very similar results. I used alcohol in spray bottle. My spray was really fine, and I have a suspicion that finer the spray, the smaller the holes that will be created on the polish.
I obviously did not expect it to be such a small holes, so I used two sticks to break up the polish a bit, so I would not cover up the base completely.
When I started this manicure, idea was to make a fun turquoise stone, but holes created were too close of the knit, so I had to adjust.
As a base, I used Picture Polish - Surf. That seemed to be a perfect base for the turquoise. I added some tiny pieces of gold leaf and randomly placed it over almost dry base.
Originally, I started with the white spotting, but that was pretty much invisible, so I just scraped the white idea.
For water spotting I used used China Glaze - First Mate. I did not want to cover up all the light blue, so I applied it partially over the nail, after I broke it up in a smaller pieces.
For whichever reason, this felt too dark, so I did a spotting using the Surf, and applying another partial layer of spotted polish. because we are talking about super thin coat of polish that is suspended over the water surface, this made dark blue slightly lighter on some places, softening the whole effect.
You may be able to see all the layers on the thumb macro I included below.
This is all from me for today.
Cheers!